


Incandescence

by ThisCat



Series: Transcendence AU [8]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence (Gravity Falls), Despair, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Master-Familiar Relationship, One-Sided Attraction, Severe Body Dysphoria, alloromantic sheep, bad mad science, rescue-the-princess plot, the Flock - Freeform, this is not fluffy guys I'm sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-02
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2018-12-23 02:22:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11980074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisCat/pseuds/ThisCat
Summary: Incandescence is made of love. She is sure of it. She is made of love and terror, and she fits into the Flock like a missing puzzle piece finding its place.She loves them all. She loves her sisters and brothers, she loves the pastures and she loves the Master most of all. She wants to stay with them forever.Too bad she might not get a choice.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is... not the fluffiest thing I've written.  
> It's actually about as far from the fluffies thing I've written as it can get. It's pretty horrible.  
> It's also been floating around in my brain for over a year, and it feels good to have it written. Almost.
> 
> It was supposed to be just a one-shot before it grew out of proportion, and it's now almost 13k words long. I'm not sure how long it'll be before it's done, but it shouldn't be too much more (she said, again). In an attempt at making it readable, I have cut it up. This is the first part. The second comes when I can finish it.   
> Enjoy.

Incandescence grazed along the border of the Master’s territory.

Her ears turned back to listen to the distant racket of her flock, the friendly chatter and the shouting of play fights with the dreams. The grass she plucked from the ground tasted sweet on her tongue. She hummed a few stanzas of a melody the Master played for them a few days since, and she smiled without thought.

Oh, how she loved them. How happy was she to be here with them, to have these borders to graze along.

Love, love, love.

She was made of love, she was sure. She was mostly terror, like any other nightmare, but she was also love. It made her different.

She glanced across the border, into the wild void beyond. Out there, love had made her lesser. It made her soft where other nightmares were armoured, blunt where others were sharp. Love made her weak, and dreamlike. It was what made her vulnerable. She knew she had lived for as long as she did only because she was lucky. She was lucky, and good at hiding, and she survived, but now she was home.

Here, love was what made her different. Not quite nightmare, but not a dream either. Love made her bright, made her a mess of colours and smiles. Love made her more. Love made her Incandescence.

She loved and was loved, and she loved so much. It had only been a few weeks since she came here, and already she loved them all. She loved the dreams dearly. She loved the nightmares just as much. She loved the ones like herself, which were not quite either-or. She loved her name, and she loved her Master, who had given it to her.

He loved her back, as well. Maybe not with the same strength of being that she loved him, but he did, and sometimes that was almost too much for her to take.

Sometimes she wondered how he would react if she kissed him.

She smiled at the thought as she looked out at the void. Would he be angry? She thought not. Not really. Maybe annoyed? Would he think she was being silly? Would he think it strange that a nightmare fell in love with a demon? Even if it was her, who was a little in love with everyone, and him, who was so, so kind.

Would he be okay with it? Would he brush it off, or would he maybe even kiss back?

She giggled, and bounced once or twice in glee. Ah, maybe she would even work up the courage to try some day.

She tripped a few steps closer to the border and felt almost nostalgic for her life before coming to the pastures. Things had changed so fast, from having to close off her own emotions and hide, and prey on those weaker than her just to survive, to being allowed the freedom to _be_ , without restrictions. It was hard to believe she was the same creature now as she had been, then.

She did not miss it. Not even a little. She went from having nothing to having everything, and turning back was an impossibility. Still, there was beauty in the void, and from this side of the border she could watch without worry.

A point of thought-light floating by drew her attention.

It was a small ball of energy, pulsing with unfamiliar and seemingly partial thoughts, and it moved in an aimless, spiralling pattern, drawing ever closer to the border she stood beside.

Incandescence could not remember ever seeing anything like it, and she walker further along the border to get closer to it, to see if she could find out what it was. Floating, partial thoughts were plentiful in the Mindscape, but they were never this… gathered, and she was curious.

The thoughts it was made of seemed searching, beacon-like, as if it wanted to home in on something specific.

It drew even closer. Incandescence touched her nose to the barrier dividing this place from the not-place of the void, trying to look closer, and the thought-light instantly froze.

Alarmed, she pulled back, but it was too late. The thought-light changed direction and shot across the border, slamming into her with enough force to lift her from the grass. She did not land again.

She fell.

The next thing she remembered was darkness and then choking, and something ripping her apart.

Her perception of time stopped functioning, leaving her confused as to how long the process lasted, and what happened in which order, but she could still feel it, the painful and careless rending of her self.

Her senses were dampened to the point of nothingness; all she got was a faint impression of movement around her and a hint of some sort of emotion, either focus or elation, but certainly not her own. At some point, her form was squeezed into something much smaller than itself, twisting and tearing to fit.

She might have screamed. She could not hear.

There were other sensations. Something heavy and constricting all around her, crushing her. A rhythmic thudding sound. The concept of something wet and moving.

She was choking.

She was a nightmare, or a dream of some kind. She was an independent, living collection of thoughts, she did not need to breathe, but she was choking.

Her sense of time restored itself all at once, as did her hearing. Sound filtered through to her, but it was wrong and twisted. It sounded like a bad recording, lacking certain tones and frequencies, and letting others blend into each other, and it was far too loud. Loud to the point of pain.

She was cold, too. A numb kind of coldness that penetrated deep into parts of herself she did not know she had. Parts of herself she had not had, before, that felt stitched onto her real self, and her real self was still tied down.

She could taste, and she tasted blood, except bad. It was blood, but not like blood was supposed to taste. It was utterly vile, made her want to purge every part of not-her-but-her that could taste it, and she was still choking, still scared still choking choking choking breathe.

Gasp.

She pushed on something burning in the not-her and her tasting parts turned cold as air rushed past them and into the burning part. At the same time, other parts opened and she could see, and the loud and wrong reality became louder and wronger.

She could see, but what she saw made no sense. Like the sound, it was filtered in a way that made it blurry and with too few colours, and the view she got was looking up at the ceiling of a room similar to something a mortal would build, with several mortal faces looking down at her. They smiled, but she could see no reason to smile.

She wanted to move, so she pushed, and something loose and jellylike not-her at her side responded, pushing against something that felt cold, in the same filtered feeling way as her other senses, and she moved slightly away from the smiling faces.

Still, they smiled. One of them opened a mouth.

“Good morning, Eve,” it said. “I hope you’re enjoying your first moments of living.”

The voice was just as loud and wrong as the other incomprehensible sounds. Incandescence pushed at the air-pushing part and drew another breath, if only to keep from choking again. She still tasted disgusting blood. Then she turned her seeing-parts down, to look at the not-her-but-her, and she pulled the loose part at her side closer.

A human hand showed up in front of her, over a human chest attached to human legs. The thudding in the not-her sped up. Like a heartbeat.

She pushed, and the fingers of the hand curled. Sinew slid over bones and skin stretched and folded.

Fingers, but her fingers. Not-her but not. She drew another breath and this one was wet. Not-not-her and her and it was made of skin and blood and flesh and she was stuck in it and she was nothing now. She was made of dirty, mortal things, and not herself.

Incandescence screamed.

\---

“We actually did it,” Doctor Garth Enns said with an incredulous smile for possibly the tenth time since Eve’s awakening.

Ida had to say she could not blame him.

“I know,” she said. “It’s incredible.”

“I mean, we _created_ a human being. From scratch.”

“ _Yes_ , Enns. I know.” She grinned back over her late lunch and his coffee. They sat on each side of the table in the lounge, with the rest of their team milling around with their own conversations and food-items. “That’s what we’ve been hoping to do since the beginning.”

“She even understands human language!”

She laughed. They were both beside themselves with happiness, exhaustion from a sleepless night the only thing keeping them from still skipping, as they had after Eve opened her eyes.

“To be fair,” Ida said, “mostly she was screaming ‘no’.”

Doctor Enns waved her off. “It’s understandable,” he said. “After all, the shock of suddenly being brought into existence shouldn’t be underestimated. I’m sure she’ll be up for conversation once she’s calmed down a little, gotten used to it.”

Ida nodded, and said, “Of course. And if she’s not, we’ll just have to figure out what we did wrong and try again.”

He nodded in assent and they fell back into companionable silence.

Doctor Enns was a scholar of the metaphysical mind, and the energy associated with it. He studied, as far as mortals were able, the impact of the mortal mind on the Mindscape, and vice versa, the effect of the Mindscape on the physical world. His specialty lay in the connection between these, present in each thinking being, and how it affected psychological development.

Places like this complex of labs, located far underground and with enough wards and shielding to be cut off nearly completely from any outside magical influence, from the Mindscape itself and from the Earth’s magical fields and leylines, was ideal for certain of his experiments, showing how a mind compensated for being cut off from the greater Mindscape.

Ida focused more on the biological side of things. She specialized in cloning, particularly of large animals, and through her working relationship with doctor Enns had been the one to discover that a being that was gestated without access to the Mindscape would be born without a soul, a condition otherwise exceedingly rare.

The reasons behind them wanting to create a living, breathing, _thinking_ person were many and diverse. Mostly it was the money. There were quite a few people around who would be willing to pay big money for mass-produced, untraceable people with questionable legal rights. In fact, there were even people who were willing to sponsor most of their research only for a chance of such an opportunity existing.

Eve was the prototype.

Ida and her team had created the body easily enough, cloned with DNA from a database and grown in the underground facility, under exactly the right conditions to turn out soulless, but alive.

Doctor Enns and a few of his co-workers had taken over from there, prepping the body for the insertion of a mind and soul-substitute. They could not use a human soul, of course. That was traceable these days, not to mention very difficult and extremely illegal. Souls were fickle things. They needed something else. Something simpler.

In the proto-prototypes, the animal tests, it had been reasonably easy to extract a large enough cluster of inert thoughts from the Mindscape and insert it into the right slot. Of course, the dog had eventually swallowed a pair of scissors and bled to death, but it had lived for almost a week. After that success, their benefactors had pushed them to escalate the testing to humans.

Once this turned out a success, they would branch out into other sapient beings, but for now, humans were easier to work with and in much higher demand, because of the relative population numbers.

It had turned out to be much harder than expected to find a thought cluster large enough for a sapient being, but they had, in the end. After almost twelve hours of non-stop searching, they had. Then came the delicate procedure of splitting a metaphysical object into two still-connected parts, as a mind and a soul-substitute, and make sure everything was properly inserted into Eve, but they did it. It took several more hours of hard work, but they did it.

She had woken up. Breathed on her own. Looked around and they had seen recognition on her face at the sight of theirs.

Yes, she had screamed, tried to claw her skin off, and fought them hard enough that they had to sedate her, but she was alive, their Eve, and it was the greatest success of their lives.

\---

“Just… gone?”

The Master looked lost, Lolonja thought. Lost and small. Worse than she had seen him in a long, long time. Not quite as bad as he had been when his sister died, but worse than anything since.

He had been distressed several times since then, of course. He despaired many times, more often than was good for him. He was angry, or confused, or lost to himself and his fight against apathy, but not like this, never like this.

He stood with his arms hanging by his sides, wings small and still behind him, looking out at where their Incandescence was _supposed_ to be. His eyes were open and uncomprehending, scanning the empty field again and again as if the bright rainbow ball of light would somehow be easy to miss. As if she would somehow be there if only he looked hard enough.

Suddenly, he turned towards her again, coattails twirling behind him. “How can she be gone? She was _right there_. You kept an eye on her. _I_ kept an eye on her. She couldn’t have gone anywhere, so how…?”

“I don’t know!” Lolonja snapped back, and she belatedly realized that she was angry. At herself, for not taking better care. At her flock, for not staying closer to their brightest, newest sister. At _him_ , for not being the great, all-powerful Master and easily fixing everything immediately.

She clenched her teeth. Sharp, sharp teeth. Sharper than usual.

“I don’t know,” she said again. “She said she wanted to walk along the border, to look at the view, and things have been so quiet lately we didn’t think to worry, and we barely took our eyes off her for a second, but after we did, she was _gone_. We can’t even find a trace of her. It’s like she’s just stopped existing and we can’t tell what’s happened to her at all. For all we know she just r- ran away without- she’s so n- new after all.”

He sunk down to his knees and pulled her close, and she shook against him, buried her muzzle in the hollow of his throat and cried. He might have been shaking as well, but it was hard for her to tell.

“I don’t think she ran away,” he said. “She was happy here- _is_ happy here. She fit right in the moment she showed up, and even if she did, I’d be able to find her easily. She wouldn’t have gotten far. Right?”

She nodded, once, and then she pushed up against him, looked him in the eyes. “But you will find her, right?”

“I…” He closed his eyes with a pained expression, and her heart sank. “…I will. I promise, if it is at all possible to find her, I will.”

Lolonja hated that “if”. She hated that it had to be there. She hated that he was afraid to promise outright, but she understood.

“Okay,” she said then. “What do we do now?”

He squeezed her tighter for a second, blew a long breath into her wool, and stood up, letting her go.

“We search,” he said. “If we don’t know where to start, we just search everywhere. Get together as much of the Flock as you can spare and head out. Look wherever you can think to look, ask whomever you can think to ask, and do what you can to gather information. Okay?”

She stood to attention and nodded. “Yes, Master. And you?”

He gestured in the direction of the physical world. “I’ll be going downstairs, see how deep I can look. If there is a single trace of her in those channels, I will find her. Tell me the instant you hear anything, okay?”

She nodded again, and he nodded back and left.

For just a moment, she hesitated, staring out at the lightless chaos of the void and thinking of exactly how large a not-space they were tasked to search, and then she turned and bounded back towards the Flock, calling for their attention. They had a lot of work to do.

\---

The second time Incandescence opened the seeing-parts, the eyes of the body that was not-her-but-her, there was darkness. Enough light filtered through that she could make out shapes in the room she was in, but it was still dark, and the darkness was as fuzzy and wrong as everything from the sound of the breathing to the sense of fabric against the skin was.

The darkness was made out of grey static, not the blank, smooth shadows she had seen the few times she had seen true darkness before. The shapes she could see beneath the static was a different room than before, empty aside from a rectangular shape on the wall and the structure she was on.

The shape on the wall had light seeping through the edges, and was probably a door, though she could see no handle. The structure she was on seemed like a bed. They were what humans slept on, she remembered.

She tried to push with the arms to move up, maybe move around and find some more light, but they would not move properly. Looking down with the eyes she could make out that the arms were tied to the bed, leather straps over fabric wrapped around the arms. The fabric was stained, and she smelled blood, and that was probably from the first time she opened the eyes and tried to scratch her way out of this thing, this not-her she was drowning in.

She made a sound with the throat in frustration, and it was wet and vibrated in a disgusting way. The eyes were leaking, leaving cold trails down the edges of the face, and she could not make them stop.

She made another disgusting noise.

She tried to move her legs. Her own legs, made of light and love and terror, not the meat-sticks attached to this not-her, but all she got in response was a sting of burning, ripping pain and a twitch in the not-her.

Another sound came out of the throat, and she shaped it into words this time. “I don’t want this.”

It was less disgusting like that. Still nothing but a sound made of a meat-flap forcibly attached to her, but they were her own words. The only thing left that was still hers, it seemed.

She had been right about the shape on the wall. It was a door, and now it opened to fill the room with light.

Instead of feeling good, like she had thought it would, it was blinding and sharp, causing pain to shoot through the eyes and more liquid to leak from them.

Once the pain faded, and she carefully opened the eyes again, she could see the strange and fuzzy shape of a human walking towards her. It wore a wide smile on its face, and it quickly walked close to her and sat down on the bed besides the not-her.

“Good morning, Eve,” it said. “I’m glad to see you’re awake. How’re you feeling?”

“Hurts,” Incandescence said.

The human’s smile changed shape, into something that looked kinder. Maybe it understood what was going on, and would help her?

“I’m not surprised,” it said. “You hurt yourself pretty badly last time you woke up. You’re probably not quite used to existence either. It will get better. Don’t worry. Your wounds will heal and your body will feel more familiar once you walk it around a bit.” It lifted its own hand and patted the hand that was not-her.

It did not seem like this human understood what had happened. Maybe it would help if she explained?

“I’m stuck in this,” she tried to say.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” the human said.

Sorry? Had it done this to her?

“We had to tie you down, because we were worried you’d hurt yourself again when you woke up, but you seem to have calmed down, so I think I can take them off. Will you stay calm if I do?”

The human moved its hand to the straps around the not-her arm.

Oh. It had just misunderstood.

“Not what I meant,” Incandescence said. “Stuck in _this_.” She curled the fingers one the hand and cringed at the feeling of sinew over bone. “It hurts. I can’t get out. Can you help?”

The human blinked once, and then changed its face into surprise and sadness.

“Oh,” it said. “Oh you shouldn’t worry about that. It’s supposed to be like that. Now, can I untie you without you hurting yourself?”

The human wanted her to be like this? It thought this was how it was supposed to be? It must not understand how disgusting this filthy body was.

“I want out,” she said.

The human nodded and started undoing the straps, another misunderstanding.

“No,” Incandescence said. “I want _out_. I want to go home.”

The human kept removing the straps, but its eyebrows rose in surprise. “Home?” it asked.

“Home. Home to my Master. To the Flock and the pastures, and my- my brothers and sisters. Home.” Not for very long yet, true, but the only home she had ever known, the only family she could remember. She longed for it so hard it hurt, and the pain mixed with the aches of her mind and not-her.

“Fascinating.” The human finished with the straps and leaned in to stare into the eyes. “Must be residual memories from something. This is far more coherent than we anticipated. Can you tell me what you remember?”

The human did not make any sense. Incandescence understood most of its words, but not what it meant by them. “Everything?” she said. “They took me to the pastures a few weeks ago. The Master accepted me. It is wonderful there. I want to go back. Please send me back.”

The human smiled sadly and ran its fingers through the not-her hair on the head, and it felt _wrong_.

The Master ran his fingers through her wool sometimes. She thought he liked the way the colours played in it as he did, illuminated from within by the light he named her for. She would lean into his touch and he would smile and scratch her ears.

This twisted mockery of that feeling was not good. It sent a shiver of revulsion through the not-her body, and through herself as well, which hurt.

The human seemed to realize she did not like the touch, and stopped, but still it smiled. “Oh, Eve,” it said. “The pastures aren’t real, I’m afraid.”

What? What had it misunderstood now?

It continued. “Sometimes memories break free from people’s minds and float around in the Mindscape, and sometimes they clump together into big lumps of energy, and that’s what we harvested to give you life. Maybe there is a pasture somewhere, but the memories of that are borrowed, and it’s better if you don’t think about it much. You are Eve, not the person who was there. This is your home.”

Incandescence stared with no words forming in her mind.

The human was speaking nonsense. She was not some discarded memory, she was a nightmare! Or at least something like it. She was a sheep in her Master’s flock. She was Incandescence, not…

“Why do you call me that?” she asked. The movement of the speaking parts was more disgusting again, as they had dried out slightly. She attempted to swallow, and that feeling was… worse.

“What? Eve?” the human asked.

Nodding would have sufficed, but the words were hers, and the neck was not. “Yes,” she said.

“Because it’s your name,” the human said. “It’s what we named you. It’s the name of the first, well, the first woman. Kind of. In Christian mythology. It’s a symbol, see? Because you are the first true artificial human. We were calling you that long before you woke up.”

“That’s not my name,” Incandescence said.

“No?” the human asked. It wore a kind smile. Incandescence hated it. “Then what is it?”

“I-” The throat closed up on her words, and she gagged. More water leaked out of the eyes and down the face, and a convulsion ran through the body. The human’s hand on the side of the head did nothing to help.

She spat out an absolutely vile glob of something and pulled in another bite of air. “It’s-” _Incandescence_. Was it, though? She looked back down at the not-her lying on the bed. Could she be Incandescence when she was lying in ugly, grey darkness, trapped in a filthy meat sack and missing the glow her Master called beautiful? When she lacked the shine of love that had made her now-siblings stop in their tracks, call the off hunt and decide to make her their sister instead?

She bit down with the not-her teeth and could not speak another word. More water leaked from the eyes.

“Shh,” the human shushed her. It stroked the shoulder closest to it, which was also bad, but not as bad as the hair had been. “It’s alright,” it said. “A little confusion is to be expected. Just know that everything is as it should be, and you will probably feel better and less confused as time goes on. Now,” it patted the shoulder and got up, “I think you should try to get some more sleep, and I will come back soon with something for you to eat. You must be starving.”

It stood there for a few seconds, waiting for her to answer.

She did not even acknowledge its presence. Only barely had she even registered what it said. By now, it was clear that it would not help her, that it had no interest in helping her, and that it was in fact keeping her captive here.

It shrugged and left.

The closing of the door once again filled the room with murky darkness.

Incandescence cried. The body she was stuck in cried. Water soaked into the pillow and cooled the face, and it was just another thing among many horrible things.

She wished she had never walked so close to the border. She wished she had never stepped away from her flock. She wished so hard that she was back with them, lying on the grass between their warm bodies and laughing at something or other.

Had they noticed she was gone yet? What would they do?

The Master promised her he would take care of her, that he would protect her. She trusted that, wholeheartedly.

He would find her, and come for her.

She closed the eyes to shut out the darkness, and tried to ignore the patterns that lit up on the inside of the eyelids when she did. She grabbed that one thought and held onto it as a lifeline.

The Master would find her.

The Master would come for her.

The Master would come.

The Master would come.

The Master would come.

\---

Dipper opened his eyes to a bloodstained ceiling.

It was white and tiled, with the blood seeping out from the cracks between the tiles, dripping lazily down to the floor.

He bared his teeth and growled, a deep, visceral sound that sent every living being within earshot running for their lives.

With a single violent movement of his hand, the ceiling tore away, ripped to pieces and fell. Another growl and another movement took the walls down, quickly and messily destroyed the house he was lying in and crushed the pieces to dust. It was fine. No one had lived there for decades.

It was ages since the last time he had delved deep enough in his omniscience for the walls to bleed. So many years since the last challenge that had required it, yet this one still eluded him.

All the power he possessed, and he could not even find this single, missing sheep that already belonged to him.

Her trail went cold so quickly it could not be called a trail. There was no trace of whatever happened to her, aside from a slowly dissipating imprint of ambiguous, untraceable energy, and searching the world for her signature yielded nothing.

It was as if she had simply vanished into nothingness.

He put his dusty sleeves over his eyes and tried not to cry. Crying was unproductive. He needed to do something, anything, to find her. His beautiful, innocent little sheep, who was _his_ so fully and wholly so quickly even the demon in him was willing to go far to get her back.

The forest around the now-levelled building was mostly quiet, aside from a single set of footsteps. Likely some random hiker, who unlike the animals did not have the sense to move _away_ from loud, inexplicable noises in the woods. A hiker who would most likely make a fuzz about a child crying in the ruins of an old house, after which there might be a lot of screaming.

Dipper did not have time for that. He did not have the time to lay crying on the floor either, so he got up and faded back into the Mindscape. The hiker was unlikely to know where Incandescence was.

Most mortals would be unlikely to know that, but who knew? One or two of them might have noticed something weird. All he needed to do was find those hypothetical people and figure out what they knew.

Deciding on a course of action, he determinedly wiped a few traitorous tears away and got moving.

The blip into the current Mizar’s bedroom was as quiet as he could make it. She was asleep on her bed, muttering vaguely into her pillow, and he had no intention of changing that.

Not only did he not want to bring her into this, he also did not actually need her for the next step. He just needed her computer.

He muted it magically before he turned it on, just to make sure that it would not wake her, and then he settled back and got started.  He hoped she would forgive him for what he was about to unleash from her bedroom.

The screen turned black the instant the page he was looking for loaded. A second or so later, the Alcor Virus’s little avatar popped up with an animated yawn, accompanied by a little yellow text box.

[Hi Dad.] it read, then, [What’s wrong?]

“What makes you think something’s wrong?” Dipper said, because he was honestly curious.

Al-V rolled his eyes, which made Dipper twitch a smile despite himself.

[One: You look like someone just kicked your puppy.]

[Two: This is kind of early.]

[It hasn’t been that long since the last time you woke me up.]

[You usually give them more of a rest between each time they have to deal with me, don’t you?]

Dipper closed his eyes for a moment and nodded. “Yeah, I’m not really after a big mess this time. I just need to find something.”

Al-V put his arms behind his back and stood at attention.

Dipper allowed himself another smile before he continued. “One of my sheep’s gone missing. Her name’s Incandescence. She shines like a neon light in every colour you can render. You couldn’t miss her if you tried, but she’s gone missing. I need you to go through anything and everything you can get access to and look for anything that could be a trace of her. Can you do that?”

[Sure.] Al-V nodded. [Can I make a little chaos too?]

“Not enough that they notice you and flush you out before you’re done,” Dipper said, “but beyond that, I won’t hold you back.”

[Thanks!]

The little virus grinned, probably already sorting out which databases he could devastate without drawing too much attention.

[I’m off, then.]

[Good luck!]

The screen went blank, and then the computer shut down. Dipper carefully placed it back where he had found it, spared a glance at Mizar’s sleeping form and blipped away. There still had to be places he could search.

There had to be.

\---

Incandescence had not counted days in the beginning. She had no idea how long she had been there, beyond ‘too long’.

The mortals in the place, most of them human, did not tell her the time, and she did not think to ask. They did not care to answer her questions, only to have her do as they wanted.

In the beginning, they smiled, all the time. They brought her out of the room she woke up in, into a larger mortal building with no windows, no colours, no life of any kind. They asked her to walk for them, to show off how well she could control the body they had trapped her in, and they seemed content with the result. When she asked them to put her back, this was _wrong, please_ give her back her true form, they only laughed and said she would get used to it.

She was hungry, and they made her eat.

The feeling of food going down the throat was the most disgusting thing she had felt yet, and it took days of trying before they fed her something that did not come back up. The food dampened a pain among many of the borrowed, mortal form, but it did not still her hunger.

The mortals spoke over her. They marvelled at the body they had put her in. They dismissed her talking about her home as an intricate fantasy, and she eventually stopped talking about it where they could hear.

She hated them.

They smiled and they praised her and they _touched_ her and she _hated them._

Hate was a lot like love, she discovered. It filled her until it tainted everything else, making her _feel_ so strongly and passionately there was room for nothing else, but love was warm and bright and beautiful, and hate was dark, cold and painful. It filled her with black tar, and it made her feel cold and ugly.

During her breaks, when they finally left her alone again, she curled up in the murky darkness and hoped.

Hoped that the flesh constricting her would rot away, so she could break free. Hoped that everything would stop being so painfully wrong. Hoped that she would stop hating.

_The Master would come for her._

She hoped, and hated, and tried to ignore the water leaking out of the eyes until she eventually fell asleep.

And dreamed.

Nightmares could sleep, normally, in a way. If they felt safe, if they were not hungry or bored, or if they were tired, they could rest. They could settle down and not think so hard, but they did not dream.

This body, this _thing_ she was forced into, it needed sleep, and when it slept, it dreamt.

Her thoughts fell apart with it, turning into twisted visions of the pastures, of the lonely void of the Mindscape, with all its dogged predators. It was a dream that first told her she had been abandoned.

_The Master would come for her._

She hated dreaming almost as much as she hated her captors. She felt like she fell apart a little more every time she did. Every time the breaks ended without a single dream happening, she counted it as a victory.

They scolded her for not sleeping enough.

She did not care.

They scolded her for not eating, or for not washing the body when they asked her to.

She did not care.

They stopped smiling as much. They stopped asking her to do as many things. They stopped asking her what she could remember, and trying to find what she knew and how. They started acting more professional with her and less friendly.

She did not care.

One of them implied they were trying again, hoping for better results this time.

Suddenly, she cared.

Her outburst took them by surprise, which was good, because it gave her more time before they restrained her.

The body they had made her use was weakened, and she hurt all the way in to her self, but she ignored it. She screamed at them, raging at them for daring to do this thing even once, let alone more.

They tried to hold her back and she wrenched free, struck them in all their vulnerable places, all the places she knew now were weak points, because they had given her a human body, let her become intimately familiar with how it could be hurt.

She fought, and screamed, with more strength than the body wanted to use, and it hurt, but she relished it.

They caught her arms and she bit down on someone’s shoulder, only regretting that she missed the throat.

The blood tasted vile on the tongue, and the body hated it, but she hated the body, so she forced it to swallow.

It came right back up, of course. She had hoped that this would stay down, where nothing else had. That it would poison the body and leave it to rot away in its own hate, but she had no such luck.

The mortals shouted and hustled, rushed around like headless chickens before they struck her down and tied her up properly in her fuzzy, dark room.

“Why?” one of them asked. “Why would you do that? You’ve never done anything like it before.”

She did not explain. She had tried and tried and given up on explaining anything to them. They never listened. So she laughed. There was no humour in it. There was nothing funny about anything, but she was choking in a bag of flesh that was tied to a bed in a dark, underground room, gagging on the taste of dirty blood, and she had nothing else.

She laughed.

The mortal closed the door and left her alone.

Soon, the dreams would take her.

What would it be this time? Her brothers and sisters falling to pieces before her eyes? Waking up back in the void and realizing nothing good had ever been real?

The Master would come for her.

…Wouldn’t he?


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I chopped the second part into two, but you're still getting it all today. Don't worry.

Oskar pulled at the collar of his shirt with one hand while the other was kept responsibly on the wheel of the car. The tie might have been tied a little too tightly, but he was almost at his destination, so he would wait until he was there before adjusting it.

Placing the hand back on the wheel where it belonged, he went through his breathing exercises. Breathe in, four seconds, hold it, seven seconds, exhale, eight seconds. Repeat. He was fine.

Breathe in.

He was a simple inspector, making a visit to a lab on behalf of the sponsors, just to make sure it was actually doing what it had been hired to do.

Breathe out.

Not a federal agent at all, oh no.

Breathe in.

Because there certainly had not been an anonymous, untraceable leak exposing large amounts of a large criminal syndicate’s communications without alerting them. What a ridiculous idea.

Breathe out.

And he was definitely not Oskar Rasmussen, intelligence officer. He was John Zipp, Mafia enforcer and currently inspector, going to take a look at the progress of the project the bosses had commissioned, and he was perfectly calm.

He flexed his fingers on the wheel, then brought one hand up to his eyes. It did not shake even a little.

Just to make sure, he touched his fingers to his throat. His pulse was perfectly calm and steady.

He put his hand back on the wheel again. Did another breathing exercise.

This was good. He was good.

The researchers already knew he was coming. The bosses had sent them an e-mail about it, just a few hours ago. Soon enough that they could be there to welcome him, but not enough to hide away any mistakes. Perfect.

It would all be fine. All he needed to do was go there, talk to them, demand they showed him everything, and explained it too, and hopefully no one would have to get angry, yes? No reason to be upset. They’re doing everything they’re supposed to be doing, yes? Now please show him more things, because they would, of course. Yes?

Yes. Good.

He drove up and parked right in front of the door of the innocuous building, and took a moment to adjust his tie before he got out of the car. Showtime.

John Zipp walked up to the door and rang the doorbell.

It took less than a minute before someone turned the lock and the door opened. Inside stood a woman about thirty years of age, dressed in a sweater with the sleeves rolled up and with her hair in a ponytail. She looked nervous, but attempted to smile politely.

“Oh, hello,” she said. “I’m Doctor Ida Sheyenne. You got here alright?”

He nodded curtly at her. “John Zipp. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Right, right.” She nodded nervously and hesitantly stepped aside to let him past, smile still in place. “I know the place can be hard to find, though, especially with the roadwork that’s been going on lately, and with the roads all soaked from the rain-”

He brusquely pushed past her into the room. “I’m not here to small-talk, Miss Sheyenne.”

She faltered slightly. “Um, Doctor,” she said. “ _Doctor_ Sheyenne, please.”

He drew a breath, stopped, and turned toward her, looking her in the eye. “I’m not here for small-talk, _Doctor Sheyenne,_ ” he said. “I’m here to make sure you are doing what we paid you to do, or if there will have to be consequences, understand?”

She swallowed, then nodded. “Perfectly.”

“Good. Now, where exactly is this facility of yours?” He kept his body language to a minimum, and so did not gesture to the normal-looking residential hallway leading into a living room, which was mostly empty save for a few worn chairs that matched the faded wallpaper. Less body language meant less involuntary communication meant more control over how he appeared.

Sheyenne nodded again, and walked past him to lead the way to a door along an inner wall. She opened it to reveal a staircase going down, and flipped a light switch on the wall before she started descending.

“Downstairs,” she said over her shoulder.

He closed the door behind him as he followed. They passed a landing on the way. There was an entrance into a room containing a few tables with chairs around them. A few people sitting in the chairs looked up as he paused to have a look.

“What is this?” he asked.

“Oh, that?” She stopped at the edge of the landing, about to head further down, and leaned back to glance into the room. “Cafeteria and rest area for the people who work here. Further down is cut off entirely from all background magical fields and mindscape connections, and it can be distressing over longer periods even if you’re used to it, so we repurposed the old basement.”

“I’ll have a look later,” he said.

“Of course, we’ll want lunch,” she said. Then she resumed walking, and kept talking. “It has to be this far underground to be warded sufficiently. This spot is ideal, being about as far away from any major leylines as you can get in a populated area. It was relatively easy to isolate the sub-basement entirely.”

She gestured to some lines on the wall as they descended, and he looked closer to see that they were in fact the visible, runic parts of several high-level wards and containment circles. He knew enough about the subject to tell that they were professionally made and likely did what she said they did.

“So you’re hidden from any tracking methods down here?” he asked.

“Oh, I suppose,” she said. She stopped at the bottom of the staircase, one hand on the handle of the door there, and briefly furrowed her brows. “That wasn’t the original intention, as such, but yes, tracking something down here would be very difficult.” She shrugged. “Nothing gets through these wards.”

He gave another curt nod and looked pointedly at the door handle.

She seemed to remember herself, and opened it.

The corridor they stepped into looked more official than the homely building above. White walls lined with steel skirting. The doors along the walls looked like something out of a hospital. From what he could see, the sub-basement was much bigger than the area of the house indicated it should be.

Sheyenne hesitated for a moment. “I’m not sure where to start…”

“I want to see everything,” he said. “Start with what’s closest.”

She glanced at him and then nodded before she walked towards one of the closest doors. “In here then. The stasis room. It’s where we keep the bodies.”

He was glad she had her back to him, so she could not see the way he twitched at that. “…The bodies?”

She nodded without turning back to him. “We grow the bodies before we do the mind insertion. We do that in another room, further down, but when the accelerated development is complete, this is where we put them.”

She reached the door and held it open for him to walk in. He had luckily managed to blank his facial expression again.

It looked more or less like a hospital room without the privacy screens. There were five beds, four of which were occupied, with one a little separate from the others.

The figures on the bed were all human women, because that was what had been commissioned, he knew, and he carefully kept his emotions off his face at that thought. They were all young and relatively pretty, and all asleep, hooked up to various machines keeping them nourished and breathing. The separate one on the far left had more machines standing around the bed, and had a complicated harness around her head and chest in addition to the life support.

“You’re keeping them comatose?” he asked.

“Oh, not really,” she said. She gave a nervous little laugh. “This is why we have to be down here. They’re all soulless. Shells, at most. Without a mind and soul in them, they’ll just stop breathing if you leave them. You couldn’t wake them if you tried.”

Oskar nodded and breathed a little easier. He did not have a medical education, but they would not have sent him down here if he did not have basic knowledge, and he could read enough information off the instruments around the beds to tell that what she said was at least plausible. “That one?” he asked, nodding to the one in the harness.

“Right.” Sheyenne walked over to that one, relaxing slightly and smiling with a hint of pride now. “This is the one we’re currently prepping for mind insertion. It’s a complicated process, but within a few days we’ll hopefully have her walking and talking. We’re calling her Magdalena, for now.”

Oskar looked down at the shell Sheyenne called Magdalena and skilfully ignored the dread climbing up his spine.

“Just a few days?”

Sheyenne shrugged sheepishly. “Or a few weeks, it all depends. We want to see if we can learn more about what we did wrong with Eve before we start, you understand?”

The dread intensified. He looked up at her a little more sharply than intended. “Eve?”

She looked startled. “Oh. Eve is the first working prototype. She isn’t perfect, but that just means we have a lot to learn and improve on! I can almost guarantee Magdalena will work out better.”

“I see,” Oskar said. He forced his hands to relax at his sides. He was fine. Breathe in, breathe out. John Zipp would not be disturbed by this. “Do you still have her?”

“Yes, we do,” she said. “We want to see how long she’ll survive, now. It’ll give us valuable data. Um, we can go see her later. In the meantime, if you’ve seen all you needed to see here…?”

He glanced around the room again and nodded at her.

She nodded back and walked towards the door. “Okay, then we can go see the growth chambers, if you want.”

The life support monitors in the stasis room had been right at the edge of his medical knowledge. The operation and function of the artificial wombs and growth pods where they supposedly created the bodies was far beyond him, but he made her explain, and with the help of the two assistants already in the room monitoring things, he got a basic rundown of how the process went. Enough, at least, that he was convinced that whether or not they were truly soulless, as she said, the bodies were never awake and probably never aware.

Despite how disturbing it was to see them lie there as dead, he could admit that the medical applications of such technology could be astounding. Still, looking into one of the pods to see a human toddler strung up and still inside was decidedly uncomfortable.

It might be just as well that the thought of this Eve kept him distracted throughout.

He tried to supress the sigh of relief once they finally left that room. He let Sheyenne lead him on to what she called the mindscape labs.

Unlike the medical ones, the mindscape labs were mostly filled with various computers and machines Oskar could make neither heads nor tails of. A man of maybe forty years stood up from a chair when they came in and introduced himself as Doctor Garth Enns.

Oskar curtly introduced his cover before he said, “Now tell me what these things do.”

Enns nodded and turned to the machines.

Most of the explanations went over Oskar’s head, and would probably still have been too advanced for him even if the machines had been in use, which they were currently not, and, Enns said, would not be until they were closer to the next insertion attempt. From what little he understood, they were meant to see and manipulate objects in the Mindscape directly. Exactly how they did this past the wards was one of the things he did not catch, but it had something to do with virtual aetheric tubes, whatever that was.

Enns also followed them into the next room, where there was more medical equipment again, arranged together with more mindscape connectors around an operating table.

“This is where we do it,” Enns said. “The only reason most of the equipment is up right now is because it’s a pain to take down, but at least you get to see what it looks like when we’re using it.”

“The body goes on the table, I assume?” Oskar said.

Sheyenne nodded, and the two of them began to explain the process. Oskar listened with half an ear, nodding when it seemed like they expected response. He had most of the information he was looking for already. The place seemed to have no defence aside from staying hidden, though he would have to look closer into that to be sure. A team storming the place would not need any particularly heavy guns. The research itself was as of yet within the confines of the law, if narrowly, but if they succeeded, if they _had_ succeeded, it would likely be a severe breach of several laws under sapient rights.

He dearly hoped they had not succeeded yet, no matter what they said.

They wrapped up their explanation neatly, giving him the impression that at least some of it was rehearsed.

“And you have already done this once?” Oskar asked.

“Yes. Eve,” Enns said. “Eve was… a success, of a sort, though not quite what we were looking for. We will do better next time.”

“What exactly was wrong with her?”

The two researchers exchanged a glance.

“We’re… not entirely sure,” said Sheyenne. “She seemed like she worked alright to begin with, but then she started fantasizing things, imagining things and confusing them for reality. Then she apparently decided that we were the enemy, and eventually she turned aggressive. Bit a chunk right out of someone’s shoulder. We had to restrain her.”

Oskar processed that. One thing about it stood out to him. “She spoke?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” Enns said. “Primarily English, but in the beginning, while she was still a little cooperative, we questioned her quite a lot, and she knows bits and pieces of several other languages. Probably it came with the memories we built her mind out of.” He huffed in apparent amusement. “If only that was all that had come with, things would have been easier, I imagine. At least we think we know what to look for now.”

“So you will be able to deliver the finished product relatively soon?” Oskar asked. Breathe in, breathe out. He did not care much for the answer, but it was what Zipp would say. He needed to stay in character.

The two of them exchanged another uncomfortable glance. Sheyenne shrugged apologetically when she looked back at him. “That isn’t really the only problem,” she said. “She’s also getting weaker.”

“Getting weaker?”

She nodded. “Yeah. She’s been refusing to eat, so in the beginning we thought it was just that, but we’ve been able to get her most of what she needs through what she drinks, and she’s still fading at a far too quick rate. Almost like something is stealing away her energy.” She shrugged again. “We don’t know, so we’re waiting until it comes to its natural conclusion and then we can cut her open and see what we can make of it.”

“I see,” Oskar said. He was glad the character he chose to play was one that kept his face blank and stern at all times, because he could fake that. Trying for anything else when he really just wanted to punch someone was unlikely to end well. “And you’re keeping her here?”

“Of course,” Sheyenne said. She glanced at Enns, who gave a small shrug, and looked back. “I know you wanted to have a look at her, but it’s about time for lunch. How about we take that first?”

Oskar raised an eyebrow. “You don’t want me to see her?”

At once, Sheyenne’s eyes widened and she raised her hands in a hurried denial. “No! No, that’s not it, it’s just… she’s not a finished product. She doesn’t look all that good, and I wouldn’t want you to draw any mistaken conclusions from looking at her, you understand?”

He hoped she was lying to him. He hoped so very much that she was lying to him.

“If you say you can fix the mistakes, I will believe you can fix the mistakes, Doctor,” he said, voice hard, “but if I have to go back to my bosses and explain to them that you had nothing at all to show me for all the money they have been throwing at you, they will not be very happy with you. So I will advice you to show me what you’ve got.”

Sheyenne took a deep breath, and said with a meek voice, “Yes, okay. It really is almost lunchtime, though.”

“Then we will have lunch,” Oskar said, “and then you will show me where you keep Eve.”

\---

Lunch was an awkward affair. The scientists were too worried about him to make more than stilted half-attempts at conversation, and Oskar made no effort at acknowledging them.

There were other people in the room as well, eating or talking in low voices, and they occasionally sent glances Oskar’s way.

That was fine. He had no interest in putting these people at ease. He did not care to make friends here. The silence worked well for him. He was already drawing up the layout of the facility in his mind and theorizing at the best strategy for rounding up all the people and evidence in the most efficient possible way.

By the time lunch was over, he was almost surprised to see he was out of sandwich.

He brushed his hands off and stood up. “Well?” he said.

“Right.” Sheyenne hurried to stand, leaving the remains of her own lunch forgotten at the table. “Right, yes. I’ll show you.”

She started walking towards the door to the landing and once again he followed her. She nervously fiddled with her hands as she walked.

“It’s really more impressive than it looks,” she said. “We’re closing in on the end of her lifespan, I think. There isn’t as much left of her as there used to be.”

Oskar said nothing. They reached another door, pretty far into the sub-basement. He nodded towards the last few doors before the hallway ended. “And what’s in there?”

“Oh, nothing,” Sheyenne said. “We haven’t put them to use yet. I’m sure we’ll make plenty of them once we get further into the work.”

Oskar nodded and went through the layout of the place in his mind again to make sure he had it memorized, then looked back to the door they were currently standing in front of.

Sheyenne still hesitated. “We, um, we used to have a camera in here,” she said. “But she broke it. We think she might have realized what it was for. She hardly does anything these days, so we haven’t bothered putting a new one in.”

“Okay,” Oskar said, trying to communicate that she was being irrelevant. “Are you going to show me in?”

“Of course,” Sheyenne said, and opened the door.

The room was dark, with plain, sterile walls and a laminate floor. It was entirely empty, save for a single metal-framed bed along the opposite wall. Leather straps hung from the sides of it, evidence that someone had needed to be tied up, but right now they hung slack and empty against the floor, despite the shape lying on the bed.

She was a woman, almost definitely, with ghostly pale skin and dark, dirty hair. Maybe black, maybe dark brown; it was hard to tell in the dark. She lay straight on her back on top of the sheets, wearing a thin dress, possibly a hospital gown. She was completely still, facing the ceiling and with her arms straight and limp by her sides.

For a moment he thought she was dead, or uninhabited, like the ones at the stasis room. Then he thought she was sleeping. Then Sheyenne said, “Hello, Eve. I brought you a visitor,” and Eve turned her head to look at them, eyes open but empty, and he realized she was awake. Awake and staring at the ceiling in a blank room.

Eve did not answer, did nothing but stare at them as if they were no more and no less interesting than the ceiling.

Sheyenne did not seem to expect an answer, as she just continued without waiting for one. “This is John Zipp. He’s here to take a look at you. Are you going to be nice?”

Eve blinked, and turned back to the ceiling.

Sheyenne sighed, and turned to him. “Well, there she is. You can look if you want, but there isn’t much to see.”

Oskar was very glad the darkness hid his expression from her, because the current set of his jaw was not in annoyance. Instead of risking his voice betraying his emotions, he just nodded, and stepped closer to the bed.

Eve glanced at him again before apparently dismissing him as unimportant. He made sure to stop before he came within arm’s reach of the bed, feeling the need to give her some space.

There were marks down her arms, newly healed wounds, possibly scratch marks from nails. She was skinnier than the bodies in stasis, evidence of not having eaten. Mostly, she looked bad because she looked dead. Somehow she looked deader than the bodies did. They were empty, but cared for, ready to have new life put into them. Eve was withering away from the inside. Whatever life there had been to her was either hidden or entirely gone.

He needed to talk to her. _He_ , not who he was pretending to be.

“May I have some time alone with her?” he asked of Sheyenne.

“Uh…” she answered, voice wavering, and a moment too late he realized what that had sounded like.

Whatever. Let her think whatever she wanted about John Zipp.

“Sure,” she said. “I, uh, I guess I’ll just wait upstairs? Just… don’t hurt her or anything. We still need that data.”

He nodded, and she backed out the door. He could not see her face against the light from the hallway, but from her voice he assumed she was at least mildly disturbed.

The door closed, and the room was once more plunged into darkness. He took out his phone and turned the flashlight on, putting it on the floor so it pointed at the white ceiling and illuminated the room. Then he looked back at the woman on the bed.

She had her eyes closed. Against the light, he realized.

“Sorry,” he said. “Is it okay if I sit down on the bed?”

She squinted up at him. There might have been a hint of curiosity in it that had not been there earlier. Then she closed them again and whispered, “I don’t care.”

He sat down on the very edge of the bed, careful not to touch her. “I’m not with them,” he said. “I know it seems like it, but I’m not. I’m lying to them. My real name is Oskar Rasmussen, and I’m going to get you out of here.”

Then, and only then, did she give him her full attention.

“Are you?” she asked, and it was not a whisper this time. It sounded vaguely accusing. She raised a hand and tapped her chest. “Will you get me out of this too?”

He frowned in confusion. “I’m sorry…?”

“You don’t understand,” she said, in a single monotone statement. She looked back up at the ceiling.

“No, I don’t,” he said. “So will you explain it to me?”

He would have said she stilled at his words if she had not already been perfectly still. Maybe she stopped breathing.

When she finally spoke again, she did not look back at him, and her voice was smaller, frailer. He heard hopelessness in it that broke his heart in two. “I have tried,” she said. “I have tried and tried to explain, but they never listen. They don’t care. They don’t believe me.”

He leaned an inch closer and his hand twitched in a need to comfort he was not sure would be well received. “I told you, I’m not with them. They told me what they did, but I don’t trust them. Please, explain. I need to understand.”

Her eyes reflected old, tired pain. She only ever moved her head and face, but it was enough to communicate as much when she turned back to him. Her next words were whispered again. “They stole me. They took me and broke me and locked me in this meat prison. I don’t know what I am anymore either.”

Bile rose in his throat at what she insinuated, and he swallowed it back down. It was increasingly clear that he had been right in assuming the worst.

“You existed before they tried to make you?” he asked.

“I did,” she said. “I remember. It’s real, no matter what they think. It still feels more real than this.” She closed her eyes, possibly trying to lose herself in memories. “It’s hard to describe the void in your words. It’s not physical like this place, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. The pastures are almost physical, though, by his power. It is more real than anything.”

He found himself nodding along. The scientists had said Eve fantasized, and that might have been what this was, but it did not feel that way. He wanted to believe her, if only because building a person that accidentally remembers being some kind of otherworldly being seemed less plausible than actually capturing an otherworldly being. On that note…

“They call you Eve,” he said, “but that’s just what they named you, isn’t it? Do you have another name for yourself?”

Her eyes sprung open in shock and disbelief, and she gasped, just a little. He was not sure the question warranted such a reaction, but she stared at him as if he had peeled his skin off to reveal her long-lost lover, so he figured it was important to her.

She stared at him for a long moment before she answered. “…I’m not sure I deserve it anymore.”

He sat back and tried a smile. It came out more like a forced grimace, and he quickly stopped. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“They put me into this,” she said. “They made me ugly and dull, and broken, and I don’t think it suits me anymore.”

“A name is for what you are on the inside, not the outside,” he argued, hoping there was something he could do to ease that pain of hers. This seemed like the right direction from her reaction, even if it was small.

There was a pained hope in her eyes, maybe a hint of longing, but still she said nothing. Scared, perhaps, that he was lying, or wrong.

He sighed. “I’m not sure if I should call you Eve. At least tell me what your name used to be?”

She drew a long breath, swallowed, and then, without blinking or taking her eyes off him, whispered very quietly, “Incandescence.”

“Incandescence,” he repeated. “That’s a beautiful name.”

A smile graced her lips. Just a small one, but it was real. “Thank you,” she said, voice filled to the brim with gratitude. “I think so too. The Master gave it to me.”

“The Master?” Oskar asked.

“Yes.” The smile stuck around as she once again retreated into memories. “The Master took me in, gave me a home and family. He smiled the most beautiful smile the first time he saw me, and I was so distracted by it all I didn’t know what to pick when he asked me what I wanted to be called, so I asked if he could find something that suited me and he picked that. I said that it was beautiful, and he said that then it really did suit me, and it was the best thing in the world. It was all the best and I wanted to stay there forever, to be _his_ Incandescence forever. He’ll come find me.”

The last sentence was sudden and halting, as if it had been unintended. As if it had been a mantra, repeated so many times it came automatically. It took her smile with it as it ended.

“Incandescence…”

“He said he’d take care of me, that he’d look after me, keep me safe. He promised. I _know_ he’ll come find me, he has to!”

“Incandescence!” He put his hand on hers reflexively, and she recoiled from the touch, her whole body shuddering before she shut it down again. He quickly removed his hand and apologized, then asked, “What _is_ your master, exactly?”

“A demon,” she told him. “A strong one. He should be able to find me easily, but he hasn’t and I don’t know why.”

Oskar had to scramble to keep his emotions off his face. A demon. Gods. She had given herself to a demon and still thought it would save her. And he did not dare tell her otherwise. Not when it was the last bright spot she still had, even though any demon would likely have dismissed her as a lost cause from the moment she disappeared. All he could do was try to give her some hope.

“No one can find anything down here,” he said. “The place is warded tighter than a nuclear bunker. Even if he _is_ searching, he wouldn’t find you here.”

That information was apparently too much for her to handle. Her face twisted through an array of unidentifiable emotions, most of which involved very wide eyes, and she gaped without speaking for almost a minute.

When she spoke, it was desperate and solid, accompanied by her hands clutching onto his shirt. “You said you were getting me out of here?”

He blinked once before he answered. “I- Yes. Once I leave this room, I’m pretty much done here. Just down the road there’s a base with a squad waiting for the information I’ve got. Within half an hour of me walking out that door we’ll be coming down on this place like divine judgement, and I’ll make sure we get you out of here when we do, I promise, Incandescence.”

“Half an hour,” she whispered, then said more insistently, “How long is that?”

A quick glance around the room confirmed what he already knew. There were no clocks there. After a moment of consideration, he unclasped the watch from his wrist.

“Here, I’ll show you,” he said, and she pulled herself up to watch. He pointed at his watch, digital, luckily. “You know how to read numbers?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Okay, well, these are hours and these are minutes. There are sixty minutes in an hour, so thirty is half of that. Look, the minutes are at twenty-four now, so after thirty minutes they’ll be, uh…”

“Fifty-four,” she said, and he blinked in surprise. “The fast ones are seconds?”

He blinked again. “Yes. There are sixty of them per minute. Uh. Click this button here to light up the screen, and try not to click any of the others, or you might change the screen. If you do anyways, holding _this_ button in should get you back to the clock. Got that?”

“Yes,” she said.

He handed her the watch. “I’ll want this back later, okay?”

“Of course,” she said. Then she looked up from the watch in her hands. “Thank you, Oskar Rasmussen. Please come back quickly.”

“I’ll do my best.” He stood up and nodded at her. “Keep breathing, Incandescence. We’ll figure something out.”

He looked at her one more time before he left, sitting on the bed with the watch cradled in her hands. There was more life in her now than there had been when he came in, the echoes of a smile at her lips and a focus in her eyes. Still, her cheeks were sunken, her eyes bloodshot, and her hair dead and matted. She still looked dying, and he dearly hoped he could help her.

The door closed behind him.

He took the opportunity while he was down there alone to look through the last few doors, and confirmed that there was truly nothing behind them other than a bit of stored equipment.

It seemed naïve to him. Either these people truly believed they would not get in trouble for this, or they believed there was no chance of them being discovered. He was betting on the latter. Either way, they would be severely outmatched when he brought the team down on them.

He could not quite find it in his heart to feel sorry for them.

Making his way upstairs, he briskly told Sheyenne that he had seen everything he needed to see.

She half-rose from her seat before she stopped, expression somewhere between surprised worry and relief. “O- Oh,” she said. “Okay, good! Do you need me to escort you out?”

“I can find the door,” he said, and left before he could see her reaction. Either way she did not follow him.

He left the house and opened the door of his car with haste. Even as he started up the engine he was tapping away at his phone, making a call.

“Sir, I have all the information we could want. Yes, we want to get the strike team ready. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

\---

Incandescence watched the numbers tick away.

The little screen was the only thing in the room that made light, and it was as weird and fuzzy to these senses as everything else, but that was not important.

31 minutes 44 seconds.

45 seconds.

46 seconds.

Were there really wards around this place, or was it just something Oskar Rasmussen had said? She was not sure.

On one hand, she wanted to believe it. She wanted to believe that there was a _reason_ the Master had abandoned her for so long. On the other hand, she had never heard of any wards strong enough to keep her master out.  Maybe they existed. She was young enough to not have seen it yet. Or maybe Oskar Rasmussen was just trying to give her hope. It seemed as if he wanted to.

50 seconds.

She did not know.

He seemed like a good human. He had promised to come back for her.

(The Master promised to take care of her.)

54 seconds.

Maybe there were wards, keeping her hidden away. Maybe there was just dirt and stone, weighing on her even as the body choked the light out of her.

One way or another, he had promised to get her out. She wanted out. She wanted air.

32 minutes 03 seconds.

The screen went dark, and she clicked the button again to light it up. It did that once a minute. It took her half a second to react and click the button. She had checked. There were even smaller numbers than the seconds racing away in the corner. She thought she was getting faster at it.

14 seconds.

They ticked away, one by one. Each second exactly as long as the last. Not like she was used to.

Back home, in the Mindscape, time went in starts and stops. Sometimes it sauntered away, savouring each second like a breath of fresh air, pausing at the corners to contemplate itself. Sometimes, it leapt, sprung ahead like a spring lamb, ecstatic at itself and scattering seconds like dust behind it.

30 seconds.

Not like this.

31 seconds.

Never like this.

32 seconds.

This was strict, and cold, but in a way, she appreciated it. Everything down here was cold and wrong, unless it was hot and wet and even wronger, but the numbers on the watch at least made sense. At least they carried promise. They gave her something to focus on, something else than the hunger gnawing so deep she was afraid she would start consuming her own memories.

43 seconds.

44 seconds.

45 seconds.

The Master would come find her.

She had to believe that. She had to believe there was still light in the world.

In the meantime, Oskar Rasmussen might make good on his word, and get her out of this cold, wrong darkness, and into something else.

She held no hope that the something else would be any less wrong, but it had to be better than this.

33 minutes 00 seconds.

He had told her she still deserved her name. That it depended on her, not what she was wearing.

03 seconds.

The screen went dark again. She clicked it back on. At least this she had control over.

04 seconds.

Did she still deserve it?

The hunger ate at her. She did not know how much of her was left within all the wet and squishy things in this body. She did not know if there was anything left to put the name to.

08 seconds.

He had called her Incandescence. It felt… warm, and right.

She closed the eyes and recalled the feeling. It was a faint echo of the warmth she associated with her Flock, with the Master humming old songs and giving her ears a casual rub as he walked past, but it was warm. There _had_ to be something left of her if she could still feel that warmth. She had to believe that.

She opened the eyes. The screen had gone dark again. She clicked it back on.

35 minutes 12 seconds.

Less than twenty minutes left. Incandescence waited.

36 minutes.

37 minutes.

38 minutes.

At 45 minutes 32 seconds, she heard a sound that was not the mortals moving around or talking among each other. At least she did not think so.

She froze up as far as she could and listened as hard as these ears would let her. A loud noise of something hitting something else. A door maybe? Raised voices. Heavy footsteps. Still far away, but getting closer.

She closed the eyes and tried to will the sounds closer.

They did come closer, getting louder and louder until they were right outside the door. Then it opened, and there stood Oskar Rasmussen, wearing different- no, wearing the same clothes, but with a vest of some kind thrown over them. He held a gun in his hand pointed at the ground. Beside him stood two other mortals, also wearing strange vests and with guns.

“I said I’d come and get you,” he said.

“You did,” she answered. She might have smiled. She held his watch out for him. “You can have this back now.”

He jogged over to her and took it back. “Thank you. Can you stand?”

Could she? She reached out for him and he took her hands to help her get up. Balancing on the legs was harder than it had been the last time they made her walk. There was less power in the body, but with Oskar Rasmussen’s help, she stood up and started walking towards the door.

“You’re barefoot,” he noted. “Unless we can get you some shoes we’ll have to carry you out to the car.”

“I can walk,” she said. She only needed to lean on him a little now that she had the hang of it again.

Around them, the other mortals with vests were hurrying in and out of various doors, talking into little receivers and searching the corners.

“You’ll hurt your feet,” Oskar Rasmussen said.

“I don’t care,” she answered absently. There were stairs. There were wards marked up on the walls of the stairs.

She held a breath as she climbed past the marks. She felt like there was something. Maybe a slight change in temperature, or pressure. Maybe a sound she could only barely hear. Maybe there was nothing but her own imagination.

“Were those the wards?” she asked.

He nodded. “Yeah, we should be out of them now.”

“So it’s possible to find us now?”

He hesitated before he answered. “Yeah, if you’re looking. No one can be looking everywhere at once.”

“Right,” she said. The traitorous echoes of her twisted dreams still did not let go.

There was another door at the top of the stairs. She leaned heavily on him, having exhausted her little energy on the climb.

There was yet another door behind that one.

Then there was sharp sunlight spearing through the eyes, and an ice-cold wind registering through the feeble senses of the skin.

She tasted blood.

When she stopped walking, he picked her up and helped her into a car. His flockmates followed them, getting into cars and herding several of the mortals from her time in the dark into other ones. The mortals from the darkness looked confused and unhappy. Oskar Rasmussen and his flockmates looked determined and satisfied, for the most part. That was fine, she thought.

One prison down, one to go.

_You’ve been abandoned. You’re going to die,_ the echoes of her dreams whispered.

She ignored them. It would be fine.

It had to be.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And the last part. In case you didn't notice, I chopped this into two, so if you've only read the first part you should jump back a chapter :)

Time passed.

Reports were written. The operation had gone off perfectly. Most of the people from the facility were willing to testify for the promise of a lighter sentence. They were still most of them likely to be put away for a long time, gross breaches of sapient rights being only one of numerous infractions made.

Incandescence slept on a couch in the local base. She wanted to stay close to Oskar, and after a thorough medical examination showed that there was nothing wrong with her that they would be more capable of curing in a hospital than anywhere else, no one had the heart to refuse her. She shone, even through a thick layer of self-hate and a slowly failing body. She was hard not to love.

The reports were succinct and plain, doing little more than getting the facts down for now. There was still much to do, and the larger operation was not even close to finished. Over the next week, a number of similar raids were executed, narrowing down the locations of the heads of the criminal enterprise, gathering large amounts of evidence and cutting off their escape routes. It was a lot of work, but it was vastly rewarding. Opportunities like this arose maybe once a decade, and they were not about to let it go to waste.

They learned very quickly that Incandescence would rather go hungry than eat solid food, as she loathed the sensation of it. They worked around it. She did not like drinking either, but would if she had to. They also learned that the only thing she would ingest voluntarily and with enthusiasm was coffee, preferably black and very strong. She liked the effects of caffeine. After someone introduced her to it the second day after her rescue, she tried to stop sleeping as well.

“I’m not supposed to dream,” she said, voice breaking slightly, when they tried to take it away from her. “Your minds are made to be torn apart and reorganized every night, but mine’s not. It feels like I’m tied up and pulled away at the same time, and it hurts. I lose more of myself every time.”

After that, and the subsequent breakdown over the coffee maker in the cafeteria, they let her keep her broken sleep schedule. If nothing else, it really was true that she was more coherent when sleep deprived than she was in the hours right after waking up.

Every day there was a new raid, maybe two, a new infiltration mission, a new drug-production facility, person trafficking locale, or money laundering business to crash. Every day they found and took down more atrocious operations, and every day they went back to base, tired but grimly content, to find Incandescence smiling at them over another coffee cup.

And Incandescence was dying.

They never said it out loud, but she was. They all knew it. She knew it best of all, maybe.

She smiled, she spoke, she hogged the coffee machine and she remembered all their names. Full names, always, from beginning to end, no matter what they went by with friends. It took Oskar three days to understand exactly how important it had been that he asked her for her name that first time they met, and that he gave her his own.

She spoke to each of them. She remembered their names, and the names of their families and pets, and she loved to listen to them talk, about nothing and everything. And she was dying.

Every day, she had less energy than the last. Every time she slept, she was pulled under for longer. Every time her resolve broke and she spoke of her own family, her own home, instead of just listening to them endlessly speaking of theirs, her sobs were just a little more hopeless.

She tried not to, they knew. It was obvious that she wanted to avoid thinking about her family, the brothers and sisters, and the Master she spoke of with such deep, sincere love. A part of her still believed in him, and that hurt to listen to almost as much as the part that was slowly giving up.

If her master really had abandoned her, they thought but did not say aloud unless they were completely sure she could not hear them, he had a lot to answer for, demon or no.

She fell apart, piece by piece, slowly losing even the ability to stay upright without help.

The doctors could only say that it had to be a side effect of what was done to her. Her exact symptoms had most in common with severe soul damage, but even that did not fit perfectly. There was nothing they could do, and they were reasonably sure there would be nothing they could do even if they _had_ known what the actual problem was.

That was not to say they did not try, but with a time limit of somewhere between another week and a month at the most before there was nothing left of her, and the only source of knowledge as to what had actually happened being a group of people who had no idea why it went as it did, there was very little they could even attempt to do.

So they kept her company. They let her make her coffee, they told her their stories of themselves and their loved ones, they threw themselves into their work with a vengeance, thoroughly and effectively dismantling an old and powerful criminal empire, and they wrote their reports. Short, to the point, and emotionless reports, mentioning no names save the essential ones, and no details that did not need to be there.

She snuck her way into their hearts, and then she fell apart in front of them. It hurt them, but it hurt her more, so they kept quiet, smiled when she did, offered whatever comfort they could when she needed it, and threw themselves into their work.

Then the work was over. Every raid had been completed, and only the clean-up was left. The reports now required more detail, more information, so that the evidence could be made as solid as possible, and so they wrote more detailed reports.

Eight days after Incandescence was rescued from the underground facility, almost three weeks since she was pulled down to be confined in her flesh prison, a slightly more detailed draft for a report was finalized, attached to an e-mail, and sent off for review. It was the first time Incandescence’s name had been mentioned in digital correspondence. It did not go undetected.

On its way through the tubes, the report draft went through a very simple, nonintrusive text recognition program. It was slowed down by only a fraction of a second, but the program found what it was looking for, saved a copy, and sent a ping back to its source.

The source of the small program read the saved file considerably more slowly, as there is a large difference between truly reading something and just searching through it for a specific word. It still only took him a few seconds before his variable counters associated with success and reward spiked, and he scrambled to double-check his conclusions, a process that took him approximately five minutes and involved hacking into seven cell phones and getting access to a closed-circuit military security system.

Then he took what he learned, wrapped it with a ribbon, and set off to find his dad.

\---

Mizar tapped away at her computer, trying to show off her latest stick-figure animation. It was a thing she had been playing with recently, and it was just starting to look somewhat fluid.

She had actually gotten a lot better since the last time Dipper had seen, which was about three weeks ago. She was very excited to show him everything she had done since then, so he sat obediently on a chair by the kitchen table and let her show him.

This was only the second time in three weeks he had sat down and tried to focus on something else than searching through options he had already been through in a futile attempt at something he was suspecting was truly too late.

His knee bounced and his hands folded and unfolded themselves in his lap, even as he kept his eyes on the screen and his mind on complimenting Mizar on her work. He should be out there. He _needed_ to be out there, doing… _something_. Three weeks was close to the limit for what was survivable if something had gone really wrong. It was how long it would take her to starve to death. He needed to be out there, but there was nothing he could do that he had not already done a hundred times. If he kept looking without rest forever, he would drive himself insane, and… at some point, he had to stop.

But the time ticked away as a physical thing in his mind, and he wanted to go out there again, to search and see if there was some trace so faint he had missed it before, that he maybe might be able to find _this one time_ …

A break. He was taking a break. He was not giving up, he was not stopping, not just yet, he was just taking a break and refuelling a bit, so that he could have his mind with him and maybe a new perspective when he went searching again.

“Hey, you okay?” Mizar asked.

The first time he had come down and tried to focus on something else, the day before this one, he had ended up crying on her shoulder.

He shook his head to clear his mind. “I’m fine. What were you going to show me?”

She grinned and turned back to her computer. “Okay, so, this one is _really_ cool. It took me ages to get that giant wasp animation going, uh…”

Before she could even click on the thing she was trying to show off, the screen went blank and an animated figure, more cartoonish than her stick figures could ever hope to be, appeared in the middle of it.  

Dipper was standing upright with his claws buried an inch into the table before he even had the time to register Mizar’s surprise. Behind him, the chair fell to the ground.

There was a small, yellow speech bubble on the screen.

[Dad!] it said.

[I found her!]

\---

Oskar glanced at Incandescence on the couch. She was sleeping again.

All of the five other people in the room kept their voices down, trying to let her sleep even as they were wondering if they should wake her up.

She looked peaceful when she slept. She relaxed and disappeared into herself, as people were wont to. Sometimes she would twitch in her sleep like a cat, but otherwise she was entirely still, serene like a fairy tale princess.

He gritted his teeth and looked away. The serenity was temporary, he knew. She would be confused and distressed when she woke up, mind stuck in a heavy haze that muddled her mind and hindered her movement. A haze that would stay for hours before she could really smile again.

The only reason they let her sleep was that they had no reason this far to believe the amount of sleep made any difference, only that it was there, so when she did succumb to it, they tried to make sure she got as much as she could. For her body’s sake, if nothing else.

She never thanked them. They did not expect it. They did not want it, not for this.

Oskar made himself focus on the hushed conversation instead. The team was on break now, though a break from collating evidence and sorting out paperwork, not from deathly important raids or preparing for those, so the breaks were more necessary, and more frequent, than usual.

Case in point, Marilynn and Dor were both spending the break cleaning their weapons on the table.

Hell, even Oskar kind of wanted to do that, if only to get away from the endless reports, and he was hardly in a position where his gun was a large part of his life, even if he did like carrying one at all times. He did like properly organized information, really, but the sheer amount of it that was needed after a large-scale operation like this was too much even for him.

“Anyways, she said she could do all my lists for me if I’d take her situational summaries, so I got that out of the way earlier than I thought I would,” Andrea said, taking a sip of her coffee. Black, like Incandescence made it. That was usually what was in the machine these days, so they had all kind of fallen into the habit.

Oskar nodded and was just about to ask if she thought Marilynn would take his lists too if he asked, when there was a change in the air.

It felt like a ‘pop’, a small pressure change, something weird, something you noticed, but not more than that. Still, it was peculiar enough to have them all quiet for a moment and look around curiously. Dor rubbed at an ear.

Andrea gave a small, confused laugh. “What was that? Did you see-”

Darkness fell suddenly. By the time his eyes adapted to- actually, there was no change in the light, but they obviously adapted to something because it took a moment before he could see again, the ‘pop’ had turned into something very dangerously different.

The pressure change was obvious now, a tangible weight added to their limbs. Right in the middle of the group, there was another figure standing, and the sight of it sent spikes of fear through Oskar’s heart.

He had his gun ready in his hands within a moment, not raised only because he would not risk pointing it at one of his teammates on the other side. The rest of them seemed to have the same instinct, with Marilynn being the only one not with their gun at the ready, and then only because her gun was in pieces on the table.

Oskar recognized him, of course. Everyone recognized him. Most children over the age of eight knew how to recognize the Dreambender himself.

Alcor. The single most dangerous creature the world had to offer. Who had torn three buildings apart in quick succession and killed over a dozen people latest last Wednesday. Whose reaction to being shot by any of their guns would likely be the same as if they tried throwing crumpled napkins at him. Whose fingers were blackened claws, whose wings were large and moving behind him in unrest, and whose face…

His face was twisted in some emotion Oskar could not identify. It was intense, teeth half-bared, and eyes wide, flitting from one of them to another without his head moving more than a smidge.

Taking all of this in had taken Oskar maybe a second at the most.

Alcor shifted, stood back on his heels and raised his head. He was slightly less poised to attack, and Oskar felt himself react in turn, claw of fear around his heart pulling him back into a similar position, even as it lightened its grip slightly.

Gard spoke first, always conscious of his duty to the team. He tried to keep his voice steady, but the apprehension still shone through clearly. “What do you want here?”

Alcor bared his teeth further and let out a growl that was cut off so quickly Oskar suspected it was unintentional. It still sent a bolt of ice down his spine.

“I am looking for someone,” Alcor said. His voice was teeth and sharp edges, rough as desperation, deep as dreams. The sound of it made Oskar flinch even as the words chilled him to the bone.

“Looking for who? And why?”

Oskar had always admired Gard as a leader, admired the backbone it took to have his position, do what he did as effectively as he did. Now, as Alcor’s eyes narrowed, as the demon seemed to wonder if Gard was going to stand between him and whoever he was looking for, Oskar was scared he might see that steel spine snapped as a twig.

The next sound he heard was possibly even scarier. There was a table between Alcor and the couch, and until now, Incandescence had stayed out of view. Now, the sound of a blanket falling to the floor signalized her waking up.

Oskar cursed, thoroughly and creatively, in his mind. The last thing she deserved was to draw the ire of a demon. They had not been able to protect her from anything, and now they were failing to protect her from this.

He took a breath, clenched his teeth together and tightened his grasp on the gun. Slowly, dizzily, she sat up, and he barely refrained from shouting at her to stay down. Instead, he moved a couple steps toward her, futilely trying to put himself between her and the demon. He was not the only one to do so.

They stood together, rather hopelessly, staring down the undisputed champion of all demons, and Alcor…

Alcor dropped from the air, shoes making an audible ‘click’ against the floor. His eyes widened until they could see black all the way around the golden slits that were his irises. His mouth opened in astonishment, and his wings stilled behind him.

Oskar had his back to Incandescence, but the room was silent as death beside the thudding of his own heart, so he heard her voice clearly. Her broken, whispered, confused morning-voice.

“Master?”

Surprise was the next thing to send a shock through him. Before he could even think to turn to look at her, Alcor had passed him, moving past their guard as if it was nothing. The guns instinctively raised in response were less than nothing for all he reacted to them.

The table disappeared. Not thrown aside, not moved, just disappeared as if it had never been, letting the pieces of Marilynn’s gun clatter on the floor, to make room for him as he sank to his knees beside the couch.

It was a bizarre sight. Incandescence sat upright as far as she could, which was not much, staring at him with such horrifyingly empty eyes, only the faintest glimmer of hope in them. He sat sprawled on the floor, looking up at her even so, with his wings flat against the ground and his face open in disbelief, with joy and horror fighting for a place in his expression.

He reached his hands up towards her face, and she barely reacted, only blinked.

“Incandescence,” he whispered. “What have they _done_ to you?”

“We don’t know,” someone said. Andrea, maybe. “She’s been getting worse all the time.”

“She’s starving to death in there,” he said, trailing off into a breath. It might have been a reply, it might not. He looked like he was talking to the air as much as any of them.

“…Really?” someone asked.

He turned towards them, then, for just a moment. He was doing something with his hands, gathering light between his palms. It did not seem to take up much of his focus, for he did not look at it, just at them, and at her. There were tear tracks down his face. The world’s most powerful demon sat in a heap on their break room floor, sobbing.

Oskar hoped to god that they were tears of joy. From his face, it could go either way.

“Bodies take energy from their souls,” he continued, just as absently as before. “She _isn’t_ a soul. She can’t protect herself. She needs sustenance she can’t get, locked up there. She’s been wasting away.”

Looking at Incandescence, eyes still hazy and confused from destructive sleep, that was far too easy to believe.

Then, Alcor apparently judged the light between his palms bright enough, because he pushed it forward, phased it into her chest, and she convulsed. She drew a sudden breath and shot up so fast she almost tipped over onto her face, but in the blink of an eye he was there to catch her, and she clung to him.

Incandescence gave a loud “Hah!” and shook her head, looking more alert than they had ever seen her before. Then she looked up at Alcor, and her face was overtaken by joy.

“Master!” she said, disbelief giving way to delight almost immediately. “Master, you came for me! I almost, almost didn’t think you would.”

“Of course I came for you.” He put an arm loosely around her back. His other hand touched the side of her face, fingers through her hair and thumb running over her skin. He stared at her with desperate hope. “I’ll always come for you. Always. I’m so, so sorry I’m so late.”

Oskar glanced at Andrea by his side. She looked back and gave a small, hesitant shrug, looking just as bewildered as he felt.

On the couch, Alcor was starting to ramble.

“I looked everywhere I could think of, and then everywhere else, and I just _couldn’t find you._ If I’d known, if I’d had even the faintest inkling, I would’ve burst in to get you in an instant, but there was _nothing_ , and oh god, it’s so late and you’ve been left alone for so long and I am _so sorry._ I thought you were _dead._ I was honestly starting to think there was nothing to find, and I didn’t know what to do, and I wmmph-”

Suddenly, Incandescence leaned in and pressed her lips to his, apparently on reflex and maybe to shut him up. He looked startled.

They broke apart, just a fraction, and looked at each other. She was still delirious with happiness, now with a hint of hopeful nervousness. He was surprised.

Then he leaned back in and they were kissing with a fervour that suited the aftermath of a weeks-long life-or-death situation. It was deep and urgent and blithely oblivious to the handful soldiers with guns still half-raised towards them.

“Oh, okay then,” Oskar heard Andrea mutter to herself.

He had to agree. The spectacle on the couch was unexpected to say the least. With a silent sigh, he holstered his gun. Several of his teammates followed his que, somewhat sheepishly. Pointing guns at the Dreambender was a textbook example of futility.

The two on the couch finally broke apart, falling into a tight embrace.

“Thank you,” Incandescence whispered.

“Always,” Alcor answered. “Any time you want, for the rest of forever, as long as it means I know you’re safe.”

“Does that mean I can go home?” she asked. Her face was hidden in the crook of Alcor’s neck, but Oskar could _hear_ the happiness in that.

Alcor pushed at her, creating just enough space between them that he could look her in the eye and smile at her. “Of course. We just need to get you out of this,” he said, gesturing at her body. Then he drove a clawed hand into her chest.

Oskar felt as if the ground had disappeared from under him.

He grabbed at his gun again, and someone beside him shouted in alarm.

Incandescence fell slack into the waiting grip of Alcor’s wings. The hand that was not impaling her chest sank its claws into her head. Throughout it all, Alcor kept looking at her with what seemed so very much like love.

“What the fuck!?”

Marilynn must have put her gun back together sometime in the last minute, because she was pointing it at the demon with shaking hands.

Alcor did not pay them mind, just slowly pulled his hands back and pushed the body to fall lifelessly on the floor. It ignited as it fell, burning with a bright blue flame that touched nothing else and devoured the body unnaturally quickly.

He did not spare a glance for the burning body, his only focus being at his hands, which, oh. Of course. That made sense.

His hands were devoid of blood, but in them, something else was dripping. Something bright in a frenzy of colour, twisting over and around itself in an effort to put itself back together and expand to its true size. Something beautiful. Something incandescent.

“Oh. Sorry,” Marilynn said, lowering her gun again.

Alcor opened his hands and the light flew, bounced off two walls and skidded to a stop around where the table had been. It quickly stopped being an amorphous blob, running through a plethora of shapes involving any kinds of limbs and anatomies imaginable, mundane, unusual and bizarre, but beautiful. Always strangely beautiful. Then she settled in the shape of a sheep, four cloven hooves on the floor, two bright, intelligent eyes, and every part of her lit up from within in all the colours she should have had but had not been given in the passing weeks.

She tested her legs, tapping her hooves on the floor and giving a little jump and a kick in glee. Then she laughed, and ran in a little circle.

Her voice was nothing like it had been. It was clean and clear like glass bells, ringing through the air with an almost painful purity. It suited her.

“Better?” Alcor asked.

Incandescence laughed again. “A million times!” she said, and she grinned at him.

Oskar actually flinched. Her teeth were long and sharp as razorblades, almost a match for her master’s.

Alcor took notice as well, apparently, because he cocked his head to the side and said, “New teeth?”

She paused and ran her tongue over them. “Oh,” she said. “Yes. Hate, I think. I don’t know if I like them or not.”

“I see,” he said. Then he shrugged. “Some time back home will probably help you figure it out. Ready to go?”

“Almost,” she said. “I would just like to say goodbye to these people first.” With that, she turned towards them. “Thank you so much for rescuing me.”

“It was our genuine pleasure,” Oskar said, automatically. “I’m sorry we couldn’t do more.”

The others made noises of assent around him.

“You did enough,” Incandescence said. It was bizarre to watch her now-familiar smile on a face this inhuman. “So thank you.”

Then Alcor stood before them, a little more composed, but still with tear tracks down his face. Incandescence walked closer and he tangled a hand in her wool. “It seems I owe you one hell of a favour,” he said.

“A- ah, that’s not necessary,” Gard said.

“No?”

“We’re, uh, not supposed to deal with demons.”

“This isn’t a deal,” Alcor said. “You’ve already given me anything I could ask for. This is…” He waved it away with a hand. “Repayment. Anything you ask, no cost at all, I swear.”

They exchanged some dubious looks. Gard visibly considered his options before he spoke again.

“In that case…” he said. “The people responsible for this thing in the first place, what were you going to do to them?”

There was a long moment before Alcor answered. “…Kill them. I would paint the walls with their blood and let the feel it dry before they died. Why?”

Gard took a deep breath to compose himself. “If you want to do us a favour, then please, don’t do that.”

“Why?” Alcor asked. There was an undertone of danger to his voice.

Gard spoke quickly. “If suspects in our custody are killed by a demon, it gives the opposition a hell of a lot of leverage on us. Never mind that we lose their potential testimony, if their lawyers are good, and we know they are, that could discredit half our case. After everything we’ve done to get here, we can’t afford that. This is likely the only chance we’ll get. I’m not saying you can’t get revenge, no one is saying that, just… please. Don’t mess this up for us.”

There was another long moment, and then Alcor huffed. “I understand,” he said. “No killing and no maiming, then, but I can’t promise they’ll ever have a good night’s sleep again. If I can’t have it, Incandescence’s flockmates will want their piece. Would that be acceptable?”

Oskar risked a glance at Incandescence. She was grinning, all her sharp new teeth on display.

“That’s fine,” Gard said.

Alcor nodded. “Anything else?”

“Will we ever get to see her again?” Oskar asked.

“I can come visit!” Incandescence said. “Right?” She looked up at Alcor.

“Not alone,” he said. “I don’t think anyone will want to leave you alone again for a long time, but if you don’t mind introducing them to your flockmates, that’s fine.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll come visit.”

Alcor ruffled her wool and she leaned into his touch. “Home?” he asked.

“Please,” she said.

And then they were gone.

The air actually un-popped at their exit. It was almost as weird as the initial pop had been.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Marilynn said.

“Screw the coffee,” Andrea added. “Do we have whiskey?”

The table re-materialized half a foot in the air and crashed to the floor. Oskar carefully put his coffee cup down on it and went to help her find the whiskey.

They all needed it.

\---

The Master’s pastures smelled like home. He still had his hand reassuringly on her wool, and it was _her_ wool again, _her_ legs, _her_ skin and bones, _her_ eyes and ears and nose.

She was different now than she had been when she was taken. Her new teeth were testament to that. The memories were there, and they were part of her as much as any other part of her, as much as the love and terror that made her up, but she was _her_ again, so it scarcely mattered.

They were not all bad memories either. Coffee had been good. Oskar Rasmussen had been good, and his flockmates too. And the Master’s lips on her borrowed ones, impulsive as that had been, was good even filtered through the muddled senses of that body.

But now…

She dropped to the ground and rolled around in the grass. It smelled like home, home, home, and it was sweet and free and real and there.

And then the Flock was upon her, dozens and dozens of gleeful faces, pressing up to greet her, to welcome her home, to touch her just to make sure she was truly there, and the Master dropped to the ground with them and laughed and cried and laughed.

And all was good.


End file.
